Galaga and How it Saved the World
by Alibi Nonsense
Summary: Aliens aren't real, so video games are useless. Simple facts... Or, they used to be.


SHIELD. It was boring. Grey rooms, grey walls, beige-grey carpet where there was carpet, and asphalt-coloured lino everywhere else…

Yes, SHIELD was undoubtedly boring. The hours were long, the pay sucked in comparison to what its employees were made to give up; the food tasted nostalgically like school dinners and the dormitories had shared washing facilities.

It could have been a troglodyte hotel.

Nick Fury – a notoriously stingy bastard with an eye-patch and trust issues – had famously (or as famous as an organisation that specialised in covert operations could be famous) bought a grand total of six games room activities: a darts board, a bring-your-own bookcase (now the proud owner of 'Love in Paris' and 'The Lilian Reed How-To Spaghetti Book'), a chess board (minus one knight), a rubix cube (still in the box), a DVD player… no DVDs had yet materialised (apparently this was, as far as anybody was willing to guess, also a bring-your-own type amusement), and a Playstation 3 supplied with the one game Stark Industries had been kind enough to donate.

Therefore it was not surprising that nearly the entirety of SHIELD were now absolute gaming addicts.

To be precise, it was only one type of game they were addicted to: namely, gunning down aliens. Some hack had uploaded Gallagher onto the computer database to keep the office workers happy, and had had his little friend paint alien faces onto the moving targets in the shooting gallery, so there was no shortage of alien shoot-outs to participate in, but the Playstation remained a particular favourite.

Games nights took place frequently. Actual nights – from 8pm to 12pm on Fridays – because their working hours only stopped at 7. They had alcohol-free beer, for those who could stomach it, and ginger beer for those who couldn't, and the lowest scorer paid for the crates.

GREEN 3D was not exactly one of Stark Industries' best (probably why it had been so hastily donated) since it was one of the games in which Stark himself had had very little input. It consisted of a large number of many-limbed aliens dancing about the screen at different altitudes and at different speeds, depending on their colour, and awarded its players a certain number of points depending on the difficulty in hitting the alien. The graphics were poor quality and the colours garish, but the lack of other options meant any type of respite from the norm was fair game and SHIELD grasped at it gratefully.

Some diehards played it at every opportunity they had, including skipping half of their allotted shower times to up their scores. It was considered extremely weak and wimpish to not have had a turn lasting at least four hours non-stop, and to forgo it for the chessboard… well, it was rare enough an occurrence in itself, let alone to have two people skipping at once, so there were little or no takers.

One Agent Herrison had snuck rebelliously into the games room on a Thursday afternoon in January after having bribed the agent in the bunk above into reporting him sick, and had stayed glued to the console until the next Saturday's breakfast time, whereupon he had been discovered by the higher-ups and promptly assigned to floor-cleaning duties the rest of the week.

His efforts hadn't been for nought, however, and nobody yet had managed to beat his 641, 826, 743 points to date.

Which was why, at twenty to three on a Saturday morning in June, having been alerted as to the giant-ass portal opening over New York City's one and only Stark Tower probably on the verge of releasing millions of hostile space aliens, Fury was slightly taken aback to realise that the trigger-happy whoops accompanying this unprecedented newsflash actually seemed disturbingly genuine.

It was also slightly creepy that it took the entire fighting force less than two minutes to mobilise and under half that to disappear out of the various exits to combat the threat.

Loki Laufeyson, had he been actually watching the battle (which he hadn't been), would have been slightly surprised to note the sudden chorus of desperate other-worldly screams filling the air throughout New York. Anyone who had ever had any previous contact with SHIELD would have, in fact. Especially since the deliriously happy, gun-toting, tally-charting, theme-tune humming group of agents did not seem to be living up to their reputation of 'boring'.

The brown aliens on GREEN 3D had been particularly hard to snag and inarguably fiendish to finish off, and this lot were no exception… Unfortunately for them, Agent Herrison had decided to try and up his high score, and all the other foot soldiers, it seemed, had agreed with him.

The Chitauri had not anticipated this…


End file.
